Anxiety! Everyone’s gotta deal with it. But for the kiddie softball team at the center of Pixar’s Win Or Lose, anxiety is so real that it takes physical form and clings to them as a blob, or as a suit of armor, or anything that manifests how they feel inside. Dealing with peer pressure, social media, asking out the pretty barista — it’s all too much for them to handle. It just comes out in the form of a monster and demolishes the neighborhood, at least in their minds.
Win Or Lose is a unique show as far as Disney+ originals go, and by that we mean it’s one of the very few that’s NOT based on a pre-existing movie or other such IP. Original shows haven’t performed very well on Disney+ and if Win Or Lose wins, it could potentially change that perception and allow for more creator-based content to be produced. No pressure, right? This team has enough weighing on them already.
Win Or Lose is the vision of two people: Carrie Hobson and Michael Yates, who wrote and directed the series. “I played softball growing up,” confesses Hobson. “Inspired by that experience, we felt fast-pitch softball was the perfect backdrop for the show. There are so many facets to playing sports that I love — it can bring out the best and worst of a person, the calmest person can lose their temper. And when it comes to winning and losing — the consequences are nothing, and yet, they’re everything. We really felt like it was the best arena for the themes we loved.”
“Carrie and I were officemates on ‘Toy Story 4,’” says Yates. “We were both story artists on the film, and we would talk about a lot of things going on in the film, as well as things going on in the world—current events, news. We would always have different reactions or different interpretations of the same meeting. One of us would say, ‘That went great!’ and the other would say, ‘No! It was terrible, what are you talking about?’ We realized that our own experiences that we bring to the table change our perception of an event. We wanted to tell a story that illustrated all of that.”
And here’s that paragraph. There’s always going to be an elephant in the room with Win Or Lose, and it’s the fact that the show once contained a scene where a kid struggles with gender identity, but was cut mid-development. Someday in the future, when the screaming is over and gender dysphoria is accepted as a fact of life, this is going to be a black mark on Disney’s record they’re gonna have to paper over. “Hahaha, we never did that, we love trans people! Also Fantasia never had that one character, hahaha.”
But that was a C-Suite decision and it’s not the fault of all the people who worked hard on Win Or Lose, and we’d hate to see them….lose. Especially if the future of original ideas on Disney+ is riding on it. The show features the voices of Will Forte, Rosie Foss, Josh Thomson, Milan Elizabeth Ray, Rosa Salazar, Dorien Watson and Rhea Seehorn, among many others. The game begins February 19.
The post Trailer For Pixar’s Win Or Lose Crosses Home Plate appeared first on Anime Superhero News.
